In addition, widespread adoption of mobile computing devices means more and more R&D and test engineers need to test different implementations of MIPI ports, with new data formats, termination models, multiple lanes and built-in error counting.

Lastly, with the enormous surge in data-center traffic, servers and storage designs must support much higher bandwidths on their backplane and networking ports. Data rates of 25 Gb/s and more on multiple lanes over PC boards, cable or optical interconnects are required by most industry standards, such as 100GbE, CEI and Fibre Channel. Testing such 25-Gb/s receiver ports requires new test capabilities to characterize device tolerance for interference, channel losses and crosstalk. The M8000 Series instruments enables R&D and test engineers to master these challenges, promises Agilent.

The first model in the new M8000 Series is the J-BERT M8020A. It enables fast and accurate receiver characterization of single- and multilane devices operating at data rates up to 16 Gb/s and 32 Gb/s. The M8020A accelerates insight into designs by: